Anxiety is your body’s natural response to stress. It is a feeling of fear or apprehension about whats to come. Many different things can lead you to feel anxious like a big exam, a job interview, or public speaking. In class, we discussed different explanations for experience anxiety which include; psychodynamic, cognitive (irrational thinking), behavioral (reinforcement), and biological (chemical imbalances). The symptoms for anxiety include; feeling nervous, restless, or tense, having a sense of impending panic, increased heart rate and rapid breathing.
Ever since high school I have personally struggled with anxiety. Anxiety Disorders run in my family so it came as no surprise to my parents when anxiety became a problem for me. Before playing a soccer game i would get really anxious and it would end up affecting how I played. Before a big test I would get that same anxious feeling and it started to affect my grades. It got to the point where my anxiety was effecting my life daily and I needed to seek some help with how to deal with it.
In class, we also talked about mood disorders and depression. I think anxiety and depression go hand in hand. If you recognize your anxious feelings are taking control of you, you need to see help before it becomes a more serious problem and can lead to other mood disorders like depression. The socio cognitive approach suggests that depression arises partly from self defeating beliefs and negative explanatory styles which can start with not knowing how to deal with your anxiety.
After I got help and learned how to deal with my anxiety I noticed an over-all movement in my mental health and my life as a whole. Just small things like taking deep breaths, or realizing that there is only so much in your life that you can control really helped me in dealing with my anxiety. Another thing that really helped me was looking into the biology behind anxiety which relates back to what we talked about early in the class about our bodies autonomic nervous system which creates the flight or fight response in our sympathetic nervous system and rest and digest response in our parasympathetic nervous system.
Everyone has anxiety from time to time, but chronic anxiety can interfere with your quality of life. As long as you are equipped with the skills and knowledge of how to deal with your anxiety and why you are feeling a certain way it becomes easier to have a hold on your anxiety. Rather than your anxiety controlling you, you control your anxiety.
